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Academic Commons Search Resultsen-usFrom Tradition to Brand: the Making of "Global" Korean Culture in Millennial South Koreahttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:190000
Medina, Jenny Wanghttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8R49Q7GFri, 16 Oct 2015 18:11:10 +0000“From Tradition to Brand” examines the construction of a ‘global’ Korean culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries through the imbrication of cultural production and information technologies. “Global Korea” seeks to transcend the geographic boundaries of the Republic of Korea while simultaneously re-inscribing the limits of ethnonational identity by confusing the temporal distinctions of tradition and ethnic belonging to the geopolitical construct of “Korea.”
Globalization was introduced in Korea as a nationalist project that continued on the developmental trajectory that had been pursued by the preceding authoritarian regimes, but the movements of South Korean citizens, diaspora Koreans, and non-ethnic-Korean immigrants in and out of the country has created a transnational community of shared social and cultural practices that now constitute the global image of Korean culture. National culture had been a major site of conflict between authoritarian regimes, opposition groups, and the specter of North Korea over the representation of a unified culture and ethnic heritage. However, civil society and economic successes in the 1990s brought about a crisis of identification, while migration flows began to threaten the exclusive correspondence between citizenship and ethnic identity.
Studies of contemporary Korea have recognized the nationalist appropriation of globalization, but I argue that the parallel development of national culture and information technology in South Korea has resulted in a deracinated signifier of “Koreanness” that can be performed through the consumption and practice of mediated “Korean” content. Through a study of cultural policies; international literary events; and literature, film, and popular culture texts, I trace the vicissitudes of intervention and opposition by state, institutional, and individual actors involved in the production and transmission of Korean culture.
I begin with the imbrication of national culture and information technology in Chapter 1, from the establishment of the Ministry of Culture and Information in the 1960s, to the application of the country’s well-developed research and technology sectors to the newly defined “cultural industries” in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Chapter 2, I analyze the proceedings of international literary events held in Seoul from 2003-2011 that protested the instrumentalization of culture while decrying the persistence of a hierarchy of cultural distinction in “World Literature.” These chapters draw out the productive tension between the state’s conception of culture as content or commodity to be regulated, and the international artistic establishment’s view of culture as a “field of struggle.” In the following chapters I chart the intermedial discourse of identity and belonging to communities of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, national origin, and class through cultural texts from the early 2000s.
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I analyze newly canonized literature and films about migrant laborers to South Korea (Ch. 3); popular TV dramas about Korean cuisine and the culinary industry (Ch. 4), and “historical” narratives that challenge generic boundaries through time travel, hybrid sonic registers, and alternate histories (Ch. 5). South Korea becomes the signifier of an ideal “Korean” space in these texts. It is at once a de-territorialized multi-ethnic space of excessive consumption; an idealistically cosmopolitan, yet ethnically homogeneous space of economic and class mobility; and a socially progressive atemporal space of pre- and post-modern aesthetes.
“From Tradition to Brand” builds on critical discourses of multiculturalism, globalization, visual media, genre, narrative, and transnational cultural studies to conclude that South Korean global culture performs a temporal double-bind that erases its present-tense cultural identity in favor of a recuperative past in the utopian future.Asian studies, Asian literatureEast Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsCo-constructing Empire in Early Chosŏn Korea: Knowledge Production and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1392–1592https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:188064
Wang, Sixianghttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D84X56WMThu, 04 Jun 2015 18:37:29 +0000Political, military, and economic power alone cannot explain how empires work, for empire-making is also a matter of theories, narratives, ideas and institutions. To sustain themselves, empires both coerce and persuade. Tools of persuasion, however, were seldom the monopoly of those who sought to dominate, for they could also be contested and appropriated by those who sought to resist. This dissertation on Chosŏn Korea’s (1392–1910) interactions with Ming China (1368–1644) offers a cultural history of interstate orders and diplomatic institutions in early modern Korea and East Asia. I illustrate how Chosŏn appropriated the persuasive technologies that sustained Ming empire as a political imaginary to contest Ming imperial claims and ultimately reshape imperial ideology.
Chosŏn-Ming relations have long been described in terms of “tributary relations.” This paradigm, as conceived by John K. Fairbank and others, understands these relations as the logical consequence of a shared Confucian ideology and illustrative of Korea’s historical status as China’s model tributary. These approaches privilege a metropole-centered vantage and have failed to account for Korean agency. They treat Korean envoy missions, ritual performances, and literary production as scripted gestures that can only reflect stable ideology. Meanwhile, they miss how these acts were contesting and transforming ideology in the process. I argue that the Chosŏn court in fact exercised enormous agency through these ritualized practices. The discourses of the Ming as moral empire and Korea as a loyal vassal, long held to be emblematic features of the tributary system, were a large part reified products of Chosŏn diplomatic strategy. They did not reflect a pre-existing political order, but constituted its very substance. They were part of the “knowledge of empire” produced by the Chosŏn court for comprehending the Ming and its institutions and influencing imperial ideology. Facilitated by institutional practices at the Chosŏn court, this “knowledge of empire” allowed Chosŏn to manage successfully asymmetrical relations with the Ming and co-construct Ming empire in the process.
Chapter 1 examines Korean diplomatic epistles to show how the Korean court used its knowledge of historical precedents, ritual logics, and literary tropes of empire-making to contest symbols of imperial legitimacy. Chapter 2 discusses how Korean emissaries appealed to ideals of moral empire and reified particular understandings of Korea’s relationship with the Ming to achieve their diplomatic ends. Chapter 3 treats Korean envoy missions as a conduit for information on Ming institutions and politics. As a result, the Chosŏn was able to construct a dynamic of knowledge asymmetry where it knew more about the Ming than vice-versa. Once empire was constructed, its symbols and institutions were subject to appropriation. Chapter 4 looks at one such example, where a Korean prince manipulated diplomacy with the Ming to usurp the Chosŏn throne. Chapter 5 shows how the practices of envoy poetry associated with the Brilliant Flowers Anthology (Hwanghwajip) became a site where competing narratives of how Chosŏn’s relationship to empire, civilization, and the imperial past could stand together. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of envoy poetry by turning to its associated spatial practices. Chosŏn court poets invested the city of P’yŏngyang with symbolic resonances that asserted Korean cultural parity with China, legitimized Korean autonomy and denounced historical imperial claims on Korean territory, all without infringing on Ming claims of universal empire.Asian history, History, Asian literaturesw2090East Asian Languages and Cultures, HistoryDissertationsMo Yan and Chinese Literaturehttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:184508
Yan, Mohttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8G44P67Fri, 20 Mar 2015 17:41:09 +0000This World Leaders Forum program features an address by Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.Asian literatureOffice of the PresidentPresentationsMo Yan and Chinese Literature (English Translation)https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:184505
Yan, Mohttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8QN65MHFri, 20 Mar 2015 17:05:51 +0000This World Leaders Forum program features an address by Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.Asian literatureOffice of the PresidentPresentationsOrigins, Ancestors, and Imperial Authority in Early Northern Wei Historiographyhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:186705
Duthie, Nina Natashahttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8NC601FWed, 25 Feb 2015 12:11:45 +0000In this dissertation, I explore Wei shu historiography on the early Northern Wei imperial state, which was founded by the Tuoba Xianbei in the late fourth century C.E. In examining the Wei shu narrative of the Northern Wei founding, I illuminate not only the representation of cultural and imperial authority in the reigns of the early Northern Wei emperors, but also investigate historiography on the pre-imperial Tuoba past. I argue that the Wei shu narrative of Tuoba origins and ancestors is constructed from the perspective of the moment of the Northern Wei founding. Or, to view it the other way around, the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state by Tuoba Gui signifies the culmination of the Wei shu narrative on the early Tuoba.
This narrative of the early Tuoba past is of course teleological: Essentially everything in this phase of Tuoba historiography leads up to the moment of the Northern Wei imperial founding, including genealogical descent from a son of Huangdi, who is represented as the Xianbei progenitor, in a remote northern wilderness; the continuous succession of Tuoba rulers that followed; and the journeys that brought the Tuoba out of the wilderness and toward the geographical center.
In focusing on the account of the inaugural reign of Tuoba Gui, the Northern Wei founder, and the record of his ritual practice as emperor, I have discovered tensions in Wei shu historiography that I believe signal toward some of the actual cultural contestation that attended the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state. The Wei shu historiography on Buddhism in the early Northern Wei then, I argue, presents an alternative source of authority, one that stands outside both an imperial Han inheritance and a culturally Tuoba tradition.Asian history, Asian literaturenns31East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsA Desertful of Petals: A Complete Concordance of Ghālib's Urdu Dīvānhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:179692
Shahid, Taimoorhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8FB51NBMon, 17 Nov 2014 16:59:07 +0000This is a complete concordance of Dīvān-e Ghālib, the Urdu works of Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghālib (1796-1869), the preeminent Indian Urdu and Persian poet known for his ghazals. The ghazal, a traditional genre of Arabic, Persian, Urdu poetry is comprised of independent two line poems called shi‘rs that follow a rhyme and are in one meter. This concordance—a complete index—is a digitally compiled work that uses his traditional divan, known in Urdu as muravvaj dīvān, as a reference point. This divan has two hundred and thirty four ghazals in total. The ghazals, however, are not traditionally numbered but they follow the same traditional sequence in all editions of the muravvaj dīvān. Here I use Professor Frances Pritchett’s numbering of the ghazals and its individual shi‘rs as found on her web project on Ghālib, ‘A Desertful of Roses’ (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/ghazal_index.html?), where each ghazal is numbered from 1-234 and each shi‘r of the ghazal is numbered from 1-. Every reference in the concordance thus is composed of a ghazal number and a shi‘r number. This is how a sample entry looks like: [word]: {ghazal no., shi‘r no.}…: [frequency of the word in corpus]. For example, ābād: {101,9}, {145,1}, {182,2}: 3. The word ābād appears 3 times in the corpus, in shi‘r 9 of ghazal 101, shi‘r 1 of ghazal 145, and shi‘r 2 of ghazal 182. Finally, the textual corpus I use to compile the concordance is also borrowed from Pritchett’s web project, and is in the Roman transliteration system used for the project. I owe much gratitude to her for making the text available publicly. Finally, it must be mentioned that this is the first research tool of its kind for Urdu, the first known concordance for any Urdu text, and is part of a larger project of compiling similar concordances for other canonical Urdu works, such as the complete works of Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810), Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (d. 1984) amongst others. One hopes to make this, and other concordances, available dynamically on a web site very soon, in addition to the textual versions. This piece has not been published, and is being made available publicly for the first time here.Asian literaturemsk2191Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African StudiesReportsImagining a Black Pacific: Dispossession in Afro-Korean Literary Encountershttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:203036
Huh, Jang Wookhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8KD1WJRMon, 13 Oct 2014 12:41:44 +0000"Imagining a Black Pacific" traces a literary history of political and cultural interaction between African Americans and Koreans from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that black and Korean authors explored literary modes of antiracial solidarity against the Japanese and U.S. empires. Building on diverse archives of U.S. missionary and Korean Christian texts, State Department records, and military documents, as well as literary works, periodicals, and jazz songs, this dissertation examines the mediums and modalities of Afro-Asian aesthetic connection that invoked human freedom and liberation in transnational and multilingual contexts. Black intellectuals and Korean writers drew a parallel between the racialized U.S. and colonized Korea to contest the racial formations of the Japanese empire in an Asian cultural space until the end of the Pacific War. This cross-racial comparison challenged the imperialistic imposition of U.S. politics upon the Pacific Rim during the Cold War era.
"Imagining a Black Pacific" is an interdisciplinary project that explores three facets of "Afro-Korean" connectedness: the trans-Pacific literary trajectories of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Eslanda and Paul Robeson, and J. B. Lenoir; the enduring elaborations of black radicalism by Korean writers such as Yun Chi-ho, Han Heuk-gu, and Bae In-cheol in Korea; and U.S. missionaries' intervention in cultural exchanges between African Americans and Koreans. Examining these three distinctive transcultural encounters, my work brings into focus the complicated configurations of an Afro-Asian alliance. It highlights the self-reflexive disorientation of so-called Afro-Orientalism and explores the experimental commensurabilities between U.S. racism and East Asian colonialism, facilitated by Afro-Korean critical inquiries into two forms of imperialism in Korea, namely, Japan's colonization of Korea and U.S. military intervention in Korea.
While scholars have focused critical attention on the political alliance between African Americans and Asians, Korea has gone long unexplored in Afro-Asian conjunctures. By extending the scope of Afro-Asian convergences, this dissertation not only fills in Korea's absence in previous studies but also reconstructs lost legacies of black internationalism in the Pacific. In particular, it reconsiders Afro-Orientalism by exploring Koreans' deployment of African American cultural sources to engender anticolonial discourses. At the same time, it uncovers black intellectuals' investigations of racism in Asian and U.S.-Asian contexts. Afro-Korean connections, or the interplay between African Americans' antiracial sensibility and Koreans' anticolonial consciousness, made sensible the hidden forms of racism in the Japanese and U.S. empires beyond the black-white racial binary. By bridging the long-standing gulf between black and Korean cultures, this study opens up new scholarly terrain in the fields of African American literature and culture, comparative race studies, and Asian/Pacific studies.American literature, Comparative literature, Asian literature, Comparative literature, African Americans in literature, Korean literature, American literatureEnglish and Comparative LiteratureDissertationsEthics of Emotion in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Literature: Shunsui, Bakin, the Political Novel, Shôyô, Sôsekihttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:202200
Poch, Daniel Tarohttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8Q23XT9Tue, 23 Sep 2014 12:32:04 +0000This dissertation investigates how textual negotiations of "human feeling" and its ethically disruptive potential fundamentally shaped the production of literature in Japan over the early modern-modern divide well into the 20th century. "Human feeling" (Jap. jô, Chin. qing) was a loaded term in traditional Confucian discourses that subsumed amorous sentiment and sexual desire. It was seen as both a powerful force that could reinforce important societal bonds (such as the one between husband and wife) and as transgressive and ethically suspect. While traditional literary discourse, reaching back to the "Great Preface" of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Shijing), defined poetry as a medium that could channel potentially unregulated emotions and desires, from the 18th century onward a strong awareness of "human feeling" started shaping the production of a broader spectrum of Japanese genres, such as jôruri puppet theater and, especially from the early 19th century, narrative fiction. I argue that the necessity to represent and write about potentially transgressive feelings and desires lies at the heart of major genres in 19th century Japan. At the same time this engendered the often conscious impulse to regulate these feelings ethically, for instance, through the specific dynamics of gender and plot. I define negotiations of "human feeling" as the simultaneous impulse in writing not only to represent but also to ethically and socially regulate and control feelings and desires. Precisely because the representation and negotiation of "human feeling" define the very essence of Japanese poetic writing and, from the 19th century onward, increasingly that of narrative writing as well, I argue that negotiations of "human feeling" are central to the broader emergence and formation of modern literature in Japan.
My first chapter examines selected ninjôbon ("human feeling") by Tamenaga Shunsui (1790-1843) and Kyokutei Bakin's (1767-1848) long narrative yomihon ("books for reading") cycle Nansô Satomi Hakkenden (Eight Dog Chronicle of the Nansô Satomi Clan, 1814-42). I examine how both ninjôbon and yomihon writings explore the deep opposition as well as the implicit affinity between "human feeling" and the sphere of Confucian ethics. My second chapter investigates a variety of novels (shôsetsu) written in the "long" decade of the 1880s: the translated novel Karyû shunwa (Spring Tale of Flowers and Willows, 1878-79), political fiction, and Tsubouchi Shôyô's (1859-1935) rewriting and reform of political fiction at the end of the decade. I for instance examine how these novels -- such as Suehiro Tetchô's (1849-96) Setchûbai (Plum Blossoms in the Snow, 1886) or Shôyô's Imo to se kagami (Mirror of Marriage, 1885-86) -- allegorically negotiate both transgressive sexual desire and chaste spiritual love within a teleological plot structure of democratic reform and heroic activity. My third chapter turns to Meiji-period fiction after 1890, in particular to texts that thematize the new medium of art as well as the figure of the artist or the literary writer. I argue that these texts -- Kôda Rohan's (1867-1947) Fûryûbutsu (The Buddha of Romance, 1889), Mori Ôgai's (1862-1922) German trilogy (1889-90), or Tayama Katai's (1871-1930) Futon (The Quilt, 1907) - continue the ethical negotiation between transgressive sexual desire and spiritual feelings within an implicitly allegorical plot structure that points back to 1880s political fiction. My fourth chapter largely focuses on the diversity of Natsume Sôseki's (1867-1916) early literary oeuvre, including various genres of poetry, so-called sketch writing (shaseibun), and novels. I argue that Sôseki's literary experimentation, for instance in Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, 1906), with various non-novelistic genres stems from the desire to devise an alternative regime of literature that mediates the representation of "human feeling" in a more detached manner than that of the novel. At the same time, Sôseki's novel writing - as I demonstrate through my reading of Sorekara (And Then, 1909) - brings back a non-detached focus on "human feeling" that profoundly echoes the earlier attempt in 19th century fiction to reconcile transgressive feelings with the telos of a heroic and ethically driven plot.Asian literature, Modern literature, Gender studies, Japanese literature, Emotions in literature, Ethics in literaturedtp2105East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsFrom Translation to Adaptation: Chinese Language Texts and Early Modern Japanese Literaturehttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:201851
Hartmann, Nan Mahttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8PK0DFWMon, 25 Aug 2014 18:11:17 +0000This dissertation examines the reception of Chinese language and literature during Tokugawa period Japan, highlighting the importation of vernacular Chinese, the transformation of literary styles, and the translation of narrative fiction. By analyzing the social and linguistic influences of the reception and adaptation of Chinese vernacular fiction, I hope to improve our understanding of genre development and linguistic diversification in early modern Japanese literature. This dissertation historically and linguistically contextualizes the vernacularization movements and adaptations of Chinese texts in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, showing how literary importation and localization were essential stimulants and also a paradigmatic shift that generated new platforms for Japanese literature.
Chapter 1 places the early introduction of vernacular Chinese language in its social and cultural contexts, focusing on its route of propagation from the Nagasaki translator community to literati and scholars in Edo, and its elevation from a utilitarian language to an object of literary and political interest. Central figures include Okajima Kazan (1674-1728) and Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728). Chapter 2 continues the discussion of the popularization of vernacular Chinese among elite intellectuals, represented by the Ken'en School of scholars and their Chinese study group, "the Translation Society." This chapter discusses the methodology of the study of Chinese by surveying a number of primers and dictionaries compiled for reading vernacular Chinese and comparing such material with methodologies for reading classical Chinese. The contrast indicates the identification of vernacular Chinese as a new register that significantly departed from kanbun. Chapter 3 provides a broader view of the reception of Chinese texts in Japan in the same time period, discussing Hattori Nankaku (1683-1759), a kanshi poet and Ogyû Sorai's successor in literary criticism. Nankaku's contributions include a translation and annotation of the Tang shi xuan (J. Tôshi sen), an anthology of Tang poetry compiled by Ming poet Li Panlong (1514-1570). Such commentaries in accessible Japanese prose reflected the changing readership of Chinese texts, as well as the colloquialization of literary Japanese. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on literary translations and adaptations of Chinese narrative texts in different language styles. Chapter 4 analyzes kanazôshi ("kana booklet") stories by Asai Ryôi (1612?-1691) in comparison to their source text, the Ming Chinese anthology of supernatural stories New Tales Under the Lamplight (Jian deng xin hua). For a comparative perspective on translation style, this chapter also addresses adaptations of the same source story by Korean and Vietnamese authors. Chapter 5 looks into the literati genre of yomihon ("reading books") and focuses on Tsuga Teishô's (1718?-1794?) adaptations of Ming vernacular fiction by Feng Menglong. Teishô, a prolific author considered to be the inventor of this important genre, has been grossly understudied due to the linguistic complexity of his works. His adaptations of Chinese vernacular stories bridged different narrative traditions and synthesized various language styles. This chapter aims to demonstrate Teishô's innovative prose style and the close connections between vernacular Chinese and the development of early yomihon as a sophisticated, experimental genre of popular literature.
This dissertation illustrates the inextricable relationships between language transformation and genre development, between vernacularization and narrative literature. It departs from the long-standing paradigm of Sino-Japanese (wakan) literary study, which treats Sinitic writing as an integral part of Japanese literary discourse, emphasizing rather a comparative linguistic approach that addresses Chinese and Japanese linguistic and literary movements in parallel. Within this framework, this project is intended as a platform for further explorations of issues of cultural interaction and translation literature.Asian literature, Chinese literature, Japanese literature--Chinese influences, Literary formnmh2109East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsContextually Speaking: Tibetan Literary Discourse And Social Change In The People's Republic Of China (1980-2000)https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:175732
Hartley, Lauran R.http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D84B2ZGBFri, 18 Jul 2014 10:47:05 +0000This dissertation examines literary debates initiated by Tibetan writers and critics in the 1980s and 1990s within the context of a rapidly modernizing society. My broader project is to illustrate how intellectuals position themselves in the field of literary production regarding questions of innovation, the function of literature, periodization, linguistic idiom, and the relevance of Indic kāvya theory, which dominated Tibetan belles-lettres for nearly seven hundred years. What discursive strategies do critics use to stake their literary claims? From what conceptual structures do they draw? How do they effect or resist, and ultimately shape literary change?
This dissertation presents a cultural history centered on the concept of discursive formations, while also drawing on theoretical insights in sociology and literary criticism. After demonstrating how translation, publishing and educational activities of monastically trained scholars since the 1940s lay groundwork for the advent of a "New Tibetan Literature," I examine the subsequent development of modem Tibetan literary criticism, focusing on topics of sustained debate. While the bulk of my findings are based on a broad survey of Tibetan-medium literary criticism in the PRC, my selection of significant texts for close reading was informed by seventeen months of fieldwork in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces, and the Tibet Autonomous Region. My research illustrates how Tibetan literary and other journals provide a proxy public forum for intellectuals to negotiate Tibetan literature and culture. Key debates in the 1980s, during which kāvya principles continued to prevail, regarded the criteria for defining Tibetan literature, periodization and the emergence of free verse. By the mid-
1990s, however, free verse was commonplace and western literary theory more available A growing number of critics altogether rejected the kāvya model, suggesting instead that Tibet's literary roots lay in pre-Buddhist writings. An alternate response lay in the nascent formation of a modernist literary movement.Asian literaturelh2112Starr East Asian Library, Libraries and Information ServicesDissertationsThe Poetry of Dialogue: Kanshi, Haiku and Media in Meiji Japan, 1870-1900https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:175644
Tuck, Robert Jameshttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8GQ6VZSTue, 15 Jul 2014 11:04:04 +0000This dissertation examines the influence of `poetic sociality' during Japan's Meiji period (1867-1912). `Poetic sociality' denotes a range of practices within poetic composition that depend upon social interaction among individuals, most importantly the tendency to practice poetry as a group activity, pedagogical practices such as mutual critique and the master-disciple relationship, and the exchange among individual poets of textually linked forms of verse. Under the influence of modern European notions of literature, during the late Meiji period both prose fiction and the idea of literature as originating in the subjectivity of the individual assumed hegemonic status. Although often noted as a major characteristic of pre-modern poetry, poetic sociality continued to be enormously influential in the literary and social activities of 19th century Japanese intellectuals despite the rise of prose fiction during late Meiji, and was fundamental to the way in which poetry was written, discussed and circulated. One reason for this was the growth of a mass-circulation print media from early Meiji onward, which provided new venues for the publication of poetry and enabled the expression of poetic sociality across distance and outside of face-to-face gatherings. With poetic exchange increasingly taking place through newspapers and literary journals, poetic sociality acquired a new and openly political aspect. Poetic exchanges among journalists and readers served in many cases as vehicles for discussion of political topics such as governmental corruption, international relations and environmental disasters, an aspect of Meiji-era poetry that has received comparatively little attention.Asian literature, LiteratureEast Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsSacred Sounds and Sacred Books: A History of Writing in Hindihttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:176988
Williams, Tyler Walkerhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8VX0DQGTue, 15 Jul 2014 09:11:06 +0000This dissertation combines methods from literary history, book history and religious history in order to map formerly unknown regions of Hindi literary culture in early modern North India. By sketching the broad contours of the manuscript archive and also looking closely at the material aspects and histories of individual text artifacts including notebooks, anthologies, and scriptures, it reveals connections and distinctions between audiences, genres, and canons that could not otherwise be seen. As the vernacular language of Hindi gradually came to displace the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit as the medium of literary, scholastic and religious discourse over the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, new configurations of oral performance practices and written manuscripts came into being; these practices and manuscripts in turn helped to consolidate new networks, and eventually bring new publics into being. For the religious communities associated with bhakti in particular, the process of vernacularization opened up opportunities for innovation concerning genre and style: by adopting certain literary techniques and particular inscriptional practices, these groups were able to deploy their writings as literature, scholarship, scripture, or a combination of all three. The distinctions that traditions like the Sikhs, the Dadu Panth, and the Niranjani Sampraday made between these different discourses and genres are reflected in the manuscripts that they created, and in the performance modes of which those manuscripts were a part. In the process of creating physical scriptures, they also transformed themselves into a different type of textual community.Asian literature, Religiontw2231Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African StudiesDissertationsThe Path Toward the Other: Relational Subjectivity in Modern Chinese Literature, 1919-1945https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:168508
Cannella, Shannon Mariehttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8610X80Mon, 06 Jan 2014 16:52:27 +0000This thesis explores the uncharted territory of relational subjectivity in modern Chinese literature. As a model of identity that positions the self in a web of social interaction, emotional connectivity, relational subjectivity suggests that the self is continually partial, open, and constantly "under construction." Lacking an autonomous "closed system," subjects remain open to exchange and to becoming agents of co-created meaning. Through readings of the fiction, essays, and poetry of Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Shen Congwen, Bing Xin, Xiao Hong, and Eileen Chang, I investigate the ways these writers manipulated narrative structure, texture and voice to present a discourse of openness, receptivity, and tolerance for difference. My investigation uncovers a wider range of subjectivities and relational yearning than was previously recognized for this era. Chinese writers also linked the discourse of relational subjectivity with a more generalized epistemological openness characterized by neutral visual attentiveness and acts of listening. This study reflects a growing interest in locating forms of sociality in the modern Chinese context. As such, my work furthers the theoretical discourse for examining self-other relationships, especially those shaped by multiple-perspectivism, non-hierarchy and horizontal ways of seeing. Finally, this research offers possibilities for locating an alternative beginning for modern Chinese conceptualizations of self in community.Asian literature, Women's studiessc137East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsValences of Vengeance: The Moral Imagination of Early Modern Japanese Vendetta Fictionhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:165362
Atherton, David Carlhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:21678Thu, 19 Sep 2013 11:05:36 +0000The Edo period (1600-1867) was an era of revenge, both in lived reality and on the printed page. During the Edo period, revenge for the murder of a senior family member was considered a virtuous act of filial piety, and, following certain bureaucratic protocols, it was legal for junior family members to pursue a lethal vendetta (katakiuchi) against the murderer. Over one hundred successful vendettas were carried out over the nearly 270 years of Tokugawa rule, events which formed the ground for a vast number of semi-fictional retellings and purely fictional works, many of them penned by some of the period's most famous authors. As an act of virtuous violence, charged with meanings that were deeply entwined with the fundamental values of early modern Japanese moral ideology, vendetta constitutes a unique point of access to the early modern moral imagination. I argue that this unique status enabled the literary topos of vendetta to speak powerfully to the desires and anxieties of early modern readers, constituting a site in which the demands of social obligation, the power of social norms and discourses, the moral relations of class and gender difference, and the ideologies that ordered visions of community and human relationships could be examined, affirmed, re-imagined, challenged, and critiqued, through the complex representational possibilities of literary art. Adopting a comparative approach that places texts, authors, and historical moments in dialogue and that emphasizes the involvement of these works in their broader sociocultural contexts, I explore the work performed by one of the most vital literary topoi of early modern Japan. I begin in Chapter One by situating the vendetta fiction of the Edo period within a broader literary and discursive trajectory by identifying patterns in the formation of the vendetta topos across works that predate the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate. Exploring the ways these earlier texts imagine the figures of avenger and enemy and the status of virtuous violence, I argue that vendetta has always been characterized as possessing a disruptive potential that can unsettle orders of authority and social hierarchies, and challenge figures of power and status. In Chapter Two, I consider the early modern legacy of this critical potential by examining popular vendetta fiction's representation of the fundamental social relationships--with the household, status community, and ruling authority--that governed the constitution of selfhood in Edo Japan. Through the liminal figure of the avenger, as a character whose pursuit of vengeance affirms those relationships while temporarily loosing him from their bonds and protections, I demonstrate the ways revenge fiction re-imagined and critiqued the individual's relationship with these primary communities. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate that this critical potential of the vendetta topos could also be turned to explore and expose even moral aspects of early modern society not closely connected to revenge. By examining the ways the late 17th century author Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) uses the frame of vendetta to invert and challenge the anxieties that attended lower-class working women in contemporary discourse, I show that vendetta fiction could be a powerful site for wrestling with the moral and social contradictions wrought by the changes of a modernizing urban economy. Finally, in Chapter Four I argue that the critical potential of vendetta fiction operates not in spite of, but through the literary conventions that coalesce into formulaic elements during the vendetta literature boom at the turn of the 19th century. Drawing on theories of melodrama to explore the ethical-aesthetic mode that dominates the representation of revenge in these texts, I argue that they expose the contradictions and repressions inherent in the virtues the shogunate was actively propagating in a bid to bolster its moral and political authority as part of the Kansei Reforms of 1787-1793. Throughout these chapters I seek to show the ways in which a body of popular texts that has been largely overlooked as bloodthirsty and formulaic was a critical, active agent in constituting the ways early modern authors and readers imagined and sought to understand their world.Asian literaturedca2105East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsElegies for Empire: The Poetics of Memory in the Late Work of Du Fu (712-770)https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:188990
Patterson, Gregory Magaihttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D83J3CC3Fri, 13 Sep 2013 16:33:40 +0000This dissertation explores highly influential constructions of the past at a key turning point in Chinese history by mapping out what I term a poetics of memory in the more than four hundred poems written by Du Fu (712-770) during his two-year stay in the remote town of Kuizhou (modern Fengjie). A survivor of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion (756-763), which transformed Tang Dynasty (618-906) politics and culture, Du Fu was among the first to write in the twilight of the Chinese medieval period. His most prescient anticipation of mid-Tang concerns was his restless preoccupation with memory and its mediations, which drove his prolific output in Kuizhou. For Du Fu, memory held the promise of salvaging and creatively reimagining personal, social, and cultural identities under conditions of displacement and sweeping social change. The poetics of his late work is characterized by an acute attentiveness to the material supports--monuments, rituals, images, and texts--that enabled and structured connections to the past. The organization of the study attempts to capture the range of Du Fu's engagement with memory's frameworks and media. It begins by examining commemorative poems that read Kuizhou's historical memory in local landmarks, decoding and rhetorically emulating great deeds of classical exemplars. The second chapter explores the shifting boundaries Du Fu draws between the customs of Kuizhou's local people and the orthodox ritual practices that defined his identity as a scholar-official. This is followed by an interlude that discusses poems on housework, in which domesticating projects spur reflection on poetry's capacity to create cultural value through commemoration. Chapter three turns to poems on paintings, arguing that for Du Fu painted images served as a vital support for memory of pre-rebellion court society, and that in writing on them he both drew upon and redefined a medieval visual aesthetic of craft and pictorial illusionism. The fourth and final chapter analyzes the rhetoric of narrative autobiographical poems, traditionally approached as non-figurative factual records, in order to elucidate Du Fu's retrospective construction of a self. A picture thus emerges of a body of work in which memory, mediated through material objects and practices, functioned to envision and rebuild frameworks of identity in an age of upheaval and transition. This study will contribute to a more critical understanding of a major poet, of the representation and uses of memory in traditional Chinese poetry, and of the emergence of new forms of expression and literati identity in late medieval China.Asian literature, Asian studies, Comparative literaturegmp2108East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsPrimers, Commentaries, and Kanbun Literacy in Japanese Literary Culture, 950-1250CEhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:165359
Guest, Jennifer Lindsayhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:21633Fri, 13 Sep 2013 16:23:05 +0000This project seeks a new perspective on issues of literacy, literary language, and cultural contact in the literature of premodern Japan by examining the primers used to study Chinese-style literature in the Heian and early medieval periods (c. 900-1250CE). Much of Heian literary production was centered on kanbun: "Chinese-style" writing that resembled classical Chinese and mobilized allusive connections to classical Chinese texts, but was usually read based on classical Japanese vocabulary and syntax. The knowledge gleaned from introductory kanbun education forms an important and little-researched common thread linking readers and writers from a wide range of backgrounds - from male and female courtiers to specialized university scholars to medieval monks and warriors eager to appropriate court culture. While tracing the roles of commonly-studied kanbun primers and commentaries in shaping Heian literary culture and its medieval reception, I consider key aspects of premodern Japan literacy - from the art of kundoku ("gloss-reading") to the systems of knowledge involved in textual commentary and the adaptation of kanbun material. Examining the educational foundations of premodern Japanese literary culture demonstrates that kanbun and other literary styles functioned as closely entangled modes of literacy rather than as native and foreign languages, and that certain elements of classical Chinese knowledge formed a valued set of raw material for literary creativity. Chapter 1 outlines the diversity of premodern Japanese literacy and the key primers and encyclopedic reference works involved in kanbun education. Chapter 2 focuses on a primer for learning written characters, the Thousand Character Classic (Qian zi wen), discussing its varied reception in the contexts of calligraphy practice, oral recitation, and commentarial authority and offering translations from the tongue-in-cheek literary showpiece Thousand Character Classic Continued (Zoku Senjimon, 1132). In Chapter 3, I examine the role of kanbun knowledge in Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (Makura no soshi, early 11th century), which foregrounds the social and creative roles of introductory kanbun material as a vocabulary of conversational quotation among both men and women. Chapter 4 turns to Condensed Meaning of the New Ballads (Shin gafu ryakui, 1172), a ground-breaking anecdotal commentary on Bai Juyi's poetry, to discuss the way that kanbun texts were interpreted and reinvented through commentary. Chapter 5 discusses an innovative poetic adaptation of a kanbun primer, Waka Poems on the Child's Treasury (Mogyu waka, 1204), which makes use of poetic topics and historical anecdotes as effective ways of organizing kanbun knowledge and also suggest the potential for introductory education to spark literary creativity across genre boundaries. I conclude with a brief look at the relevance of premodern Japanese kanbun education for broader questions about literary language and for comparisons involving other transregional classical languages like Latin. By illustrating the processes by which elements of Chinese literary culture were adopted and adapted throughout East Asia, this project provides fertile ground for exploring issues of literacy and cultural interaction that underlie all forms of literature.Asian literature, Asian studiesjlg2156East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsFissured Languages of Empire: Gender, Ethnicity, and Literature in Japan and Korea, 1930s-1950shttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:165168
Yi, Christina Song Mehttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:21622Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:41:15 +0000This dissertation investigates how Japanese-language literature by Korean writers both emerged out of and stood in opposition to discourses of national language, literature, and identity. The project is twofold in nature. First, I examine the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reassessing the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these texts. Second, I trace how postwar reconstructions of ethnic nationality gave rise to the specific genre of zainichi (lit. "residing in Japan") literature. By situating these two valences together, I attempt to highlight the continuities among the established fields of colonial-period literature, modern Japanese literature, and modern Korean literature. Included in my analyses is a consideration of literature written by Japanese writers in Korea, transnational media and publishing culture in East Asia, the gender politics of national language, and the ways in which kominka (imperialization) policies were neither limited to the colonized alone nor completely erased after 1945.
Rather than view the boundaries between "Japanese" and "Korean" literature as fixed or self-evident, this study examines the historical construction of these categories as generative discourses embedded in specific social, material, and political conditions. I do this through close analytical readings of a wide variety of primary texts written in Japanese by both Korean and Japanese writers, while contextualizing these readings in relation to the materiality of the literary journal. I also include a consideration of the canonization process over time, and the role literary criticism has played in actively shaping national canons.
Chapter 1 centers around the 1940s "Korean boom," a term that refers to the marked rise in Japanese-language works published in the metropole on Korea and its culture, written by Japanese and Korean authors alike. Through broad intertextual analyses of major Japanese literary journals and influential texts by Korean writers produced during the "Korean boom," I examine the role played by the Japanese publishing industry in promoting the inclusion of Koreans in the empire while simultaneously excluding them from the privileged space of the nation. I also deconstruct the myth of a single "Korean" people, and consider how an individual's position within the uneven playing field of colonialism may shift according to gender and class.Chapter 2 deals with the ideologies of kokugo (national language; here, Japanese) and kokumin bungaku (national literature) during the latter years of Japan's imperial rule. The major texts I introduce in this chapter include Obi Juzo's "Tohan" (Ascent, 1944), first printed in the Japanese-language journal Kokumin bungaku based in Keijo (present-day Seoul); a comparison of the kominka essays written by Yi Kwangsu in Korean and Japanese; and the short story "Aikoku kodomo tai" (Patriotic Children's Squad, 1941), written by a Korean schoolgirl named Yi Chongnae. Through these texts, I show how kokumin bungaku depended upon the inclusion of colonial writers but simultaneously denied them an autonomy outside the strictures of the Japanese language, or kokugo. In Chapter 3, I move to Occupation-period Japan and the writings of Kim Talsu, Miyamoto Yuriko, and Nakano Shigeharu. While Koreans celebrated Japan's defeat as a day of independence from colonial rule, the political status of Koreans in Korea and in Japan remained far from independent under Allied policy. I outline the complicated factors that led to the creation of a stateless Korean diaspora in Japan and highlight the responses of Korean and Japanese writers who saw these political conditions as a sign of an imperialist system still insidiously intact. In looking at Kim Talsu's fiction in particular, I am able to examine both the continuities and discontinuities in definitions of national language, literature, and ethnicity that occurred across 1945 and map out the evolving position of Koreans in Japan.
Chapter 4 compares the collaboration debates that occurred in post-1945 Korea with the arguments over war responsibility that occurred in Japan in the same period, focusing on the writings of Chang Hyokchu and Tanaka Hidemitsu. Although the works of both individuals have been neglected in contemporary literary scholarship, I argue that their postwar writings reveal how Korean collaboration (ch'inilp'a) and Japanese war responsibility (senso sekinin) emerged as mutually constitutive discourses that embodied - rather than healed - the traumas of colonialism and empire. Finally, in the epilogue of this dissertation, I introduce the writings of the self-identified zainichi author Yi Yangji in order to consider how all of the historical developments outlined in the previous chapters still exist as lived realities for many zainichi Koreans even today.Asian literature, Asian studies, Gender studiescsy2103East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsA Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate Worldhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:165353
Dudney, Arthurhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:21620Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:29:29 +0000During the early-modern period, Persian was the language of the imperial court and a prestigious literary medium in South Asia. Not only did Persian connect the Subcontinent with intellectual and cultural trends across western and central Asia, but during the early-modern period, India--even compared with Iran--was arguably the world's main center for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship. However, our understanding of the societal role of Indo-Persian (that is, Persian used in South Asia) is still hazy in part because the end of Persian as a language of power in India has been so historiographically over-determined. Colonial intellectuals and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Iran and India have claimed that by the eighteenth century Indo-Persian had become an artificial, ossified tradition in decline, symptomatic of a political system in decline, whose ineluctable destiny was to be replaced by supposedly more democratic and properly Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu. The present study seeks to nuance and in some cases to completely revise this declinist narrative through an examination of eighteenth-century primary sources. This dissertation traces the development of philology (the study of literary language, known in Persian under several names including 'ilm-i lughat) within the Indo-Persian tradition, concentrating on its social and political ramifications, and the modes by which Indo-Persian writers smoothed the way for the adoption of the vernacular in contexts formerly reserved for Persian. The eighteenth century is a hinge between the pre-modern and the colonial modern, and yet our understanding of the intellectual history of that century is much poorer than for the colonial period. The most prolific and arguably most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the early-modern period was Siraj al-Din 'Ali Khan (1687/8-1756), whose nom de plume was Arzu. Besides being a much-admired poet in Persian and Urdu, Arzu was a rigorous theoretician of language. Arzu's conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change, a project whose newness he acknowledges and which was necessary in the face of the tazah go'i [literally, "fresh speaking"] movement in Persian literature. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranians versus Indians), the primary sources complicate the picture. The present study draws an analogy to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Europe to show that the contemporary concern had far less to do with geography than with the question of how to interpret innovative "fresh speaking" poetry (just as in Europe the concern had been over assessing the value of texts not modeled on the Classics). Arzu used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation and be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. In doing so he carefully defined the differences in usage within the Persian cosmopolis, and concluded that Indo-Persian usage was within the norms of Persian usage generally, meaning that properly educated Indians had as much right as Iranian native speakers to innovate in Persian. An intervention offered by the present research is the recognition that Arzu's theories, which superficially seem to concern only Persian, apply to language more generally. A study of his work can therefore elucidate the mechanisms that allowed Urdu to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India during his lifetime. An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual history, both in India and in the West, is that advances in vernacular literary culture have usually come about not through a repudiation of the classics and their language but rather through a sustained engagement with them by bilingual writers. By changing attitudes about rekhtah, a Persianized form of vernacular composition that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, Arzu defined and systematized vernacular literary production. Furthermore, this study presents a challenge to the persistent misconception that Indians started writing Urdu because they were ashamed of their poor Persian.Asian literature, Middle Eastern literature, Asian history, Persian languageadd2115Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African StudiesDissertationsThe Middle Manhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:162613
Ahmed, Mananhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:20830Thu, 20 Jun 2013 15:05:05 +0000A small study of Naomul Hotchand's 1872 memoir (written in Sindh) and the post-colonial nationalist readings of it. Includes the Urdu translation done by Aftab Ahmad; Artwork by Rajkamal Kahlon and Daisy Rockwell.Asian literature, South Asian studiesma3179HistoryReportsWaka After the Kokinshu: Anatomy of a Cultural Phenomenonhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:188624
Persiani, Gian Pierohttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8SF2VHGFri, 07 Jun 2013 16:07:34 +0000The dissertation is a study of the boom of waka poetry in the tenth century. Waka is approached here as a cultural phenomenon, that is, a complex system of people, practices, and ideas centering around the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural artifacts. Four main aspects of this system are examined: first, the network of people who, at various stages and in different ways, were involved in it. I identify three primary groups of agents (the poets, the patrons, and the public) and provide an analysis of each. Second, the body of ideas and beliefs that motivated and sustained involvement with waka as either poets, or patrons, or recipients. Third, the shared body of ingredients and skills that poets used to craft their works. Fourth and final, the criteria that contemporary audiences used to evaluate poems. Each chapter deals with a specific aspect. Chapter 1 and 2 provide a sort of bird's eye view of the social world behind the waka phenomenon. Chapter 1 uses criteria such as social position and gender to present a typology of poets in tenth century court society. I distinguish between low-ranking poets who viewed waka as a potential pathway to career advancement, and high-ranking poets who used it mainly as a tool for conducting dalliances and as a marker of status. I also examine the case of women poets, and discuss whether it is legitimate to see them as a distinct type. Chapter 2 focuses on the contribution of the patrons and the public. I start with a short history of patronage from the origins to the mid-tenth century, and then discuss various specific aspects of patronage, including its relation to the monjo keikoku theory (the idea that literature was useful for government), the appearance of the "poetry specialists" (senmon kajin), and the role of women as patrons of waka. This chapter also sketches a first, tentative profile of the waka public, and identifies some of the areas that a more thorough study should or could cover. Chapter 3 deals with the ideas and beliefs that motivated and sustained the waka phenomenon of the tenth century. As Bourdieu notes, "the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work, or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work." Some of the developments that the chapter examines are the emergence of a new view of poetry-making as a pathway to immortality, a new image of the poet as a literary giant worthy of the respect and admiration of society, the emergence of a proto-celebrity culture around poets and their work via poem-stories (utagatari), and the sedimentation of the connection between poetry and courtly elegance (miyabi). Chapter 4 focuses on the body of ingredients and skills that poets used to make poems. I discuss how poetic know-how was acquired through study, what it consisted of, and several methods to apply it in actual composition. A discussion of the Kokin waka rokujo (Six Tomes of waka, c. 974), a giant poetry collection probably intended to serve as a reference book for poets, completes the chapter. Chapter 5 deals with contemporary criteria to evaluate poetry. Two main texts are examined: the Tentoku yo'nen dairi uta-awase (Poetry contest at the Palace of the Fourth Year of Tentoku, 960), and the Waka kuhon (Nine Grades of waka, c. 1009) by Fujiwara no Kinto; (966-1044). The final section of the chapter discusses Tokieda Motoki's argument that since poetry was used in everyday life as a medium of communication, the aesthetic value of a poem was often less important than its performative value.Asian literature, Literaturegp2029East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsPoetry and Prayer: Stotras in the Religious and Literary History of Kashmirhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:161628
Stainton, Hamsa Michaelhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:20485Thu, 30 May 2013 14:18:32 +0000This dissertation investigates the close connection between poetry and prayer in South Asia by studying the history of Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotras) in Kashmir. It offers a broad introduction to the history and general features of the stotra genre, and it charts the course of these literary hymns in Kashmir from the ninth century to the present. Historically, Kashmir was one of the most dynamic and influential centers of Sanskrit learning and literary production in South Asia. This dissertation focuses on a number of innovative texts from this region, such as Ksemaraja's eleventh-century commentaries and Sahib Kaul's seventeenth-century hymns, which have received little scholarly attention. In particular, it offers the first study in any European language of the Stutikusumanjali, a major work of religious literature dedicated to the god Siva and one of the only extant witnesses to the trajectory of Sanskrit literary culture in fourteenth-century Kashmir. This dissertation also contributes to the study of Saivism by examining the ways that Saiva poets have integrated the traditions of Sanskrit literature (kavya) and poetics (alankarasastra), theology (especially non-dualism), and Saiva worship and devotion. It argues for the diverse configurations of Saiva bhakti expressed and explored in these literary hymns and the challenges they present for standard interpretations of Hindu bhakti. More broadly, this study of stotras from Kashmir offers new perspectives on the history and vitality of prayer in South Asia and its complex relationships to poetry and poetics.Religion, South Asian studies, Asian literaturehms2122ReligionDissertationsA Comparative Analysis of the Roman and Portuguese Pepper Tradehttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:158559
De Romanis, Federicohttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:19539Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:00:24 +0000A comparison of the pepper trade in the ancient and early modern eras allows insights that might otherwise be missed during the individual analysis of Indian trade in each time period. The abundant and rich documentation of the early modern period helps to clarify the rarer and more controversial ancient documents, which in their turn demonstrate the chronological depth of a phenomenon so clearly observable in the modern age. For instance, information obtained from early modern travelogues helps both to define the geographical, ecological and anthropological context of surplus Malabar pepper production and to decipher the cryptic references to production in the classical literature. What emerges is that, from antiquity to modernity, trade depended less on the pepper harvested by the low caste people in the small gardens of the coastal areas than on the pepper collected by the tribal people in the highland forests of the Ghats.World history, Asian literatureItalian AcademyAbstractsLiving Comparatively: On the Comparisons of India and China in the Works of Kang Youwei and Zhang Taiyanhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:158274
Liu, Andrew B.http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:19516Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:31:00 +0000This paper examines the comparisons between India and China that were advanced by two exiled Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth-century: Kang Youwei and Zhang Taiyan (Zhang Binglin).Asian history, Asian literatureabl2002HistoryReportsToward an Extraordinary Everyday: Li Yu's (1611-1680) Vision, Writing, and Practicehttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:184115
Kile, Sarahhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:19308Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:23:01 +0000This dissertation considers how the literatus entrepreneur Li Yu (1610-1680) took advantage of the burgeoning market economy of early Qing China to engineer and market a new experience of the everyday. The world in which Li Yu's cultural products were best sellers was rife with novelty. The Ming dynasty had collapsed in 1644, yet many of its defining features remained: urban centers brimmed with gadgets, both Chinese and foreign, that offered new possibilities for engaging the material world. The status of writing and the reading public was also changing, as more books were published at lower costs than ever before. Li Yu capitalized on this ripe moment to develop and sell cultural products that directed the focus of consumers to the details and possibilities of their everyday. I argue that through his cultural production, Li Yu changed what constituted cultural capital and who had rights to it in the urban centers of southern China in the early Qing. Li Yu made a brand of his name, which he used to market his fiction and drama as well as intangible products like innovative designs and do-it-yourself technologies. I examine the strategies that traverse the range of his cultural production to demonstrate how he altered the physical makeup of the built environment and the visual experience of theatrical performance, while also revising the ways that they could be represented in language and depicted in narrative. Readers of Li Yu's writing, visitors to his gardens, and audiences for his theatrical productions could expect to encounter particulars: his language zooms in on the material world, narrating the gritty specifics of genitals and dirt; he waxes technical about his rigged stage lighting and dioramic windows. In one of his stories, a man uses a telescope to impersonate a god; in another a wily thief cannot "see" a woman's myopia, and so misjudges her. At the heart of this study is Li Yu's magnum opus, Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji), a curious collection of several hundred essays on topics that range from theater direction to heating, choosing a concubine to balustrade design, the art of walking to pomegranate trees. This text has some commonalities with late-Ming manuals of taste, which documented the fine points of distinction around which people negotiated their status vis-à-vis conspicuous consumption of luxury commodities. In the late Ming, these markers of social distinction were hotly debated as merchants challenged literati claims to rights over cultural capital. I show how Li Yu departs from late-Ming discourse by rejecting luxury commodities to locate discernment instead in readers who join him in experimenting with his reproducible designs and technological improvements in the spaces of their everyday lives. I contend that these experiments reveal the limitations of grand narratives of the day--such as Confucian morality, gender norms, fate, and medicine--by exploiting their contingencies, and by elevating the status of individual experience.Asian literature, Asian historysek2114East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsLiterary Writing, Print Media, and Urban Space in Modern Japan, 1895-1933https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:178896
Shockey, Nathanhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:15175Fri, 02 Nov 2012 22:34:45 +0000The first decades of the 20th century saw the radical transformation of the ways in which literary media was produced and consumed in Japan. A new mass readership and a widening market for all manner of typographic print formed a rapidly changing ground upon which writers and critics reassessed how, why, and for whom they created works of literature and social thought. This dissertation examines a selection of fictional and critical texts from the turn of the century through the 1930s to demonstrate how mass-produced typographic media both served to produce mass consumer society in this period and functioned as sites for its critique, extending the aesthetic, linguistic, and political horizons of modern Japanese social life. I contend that an engagement with the commodity character of printed text enabled authors to develop experimental practices of writing that problematized the nexus of mutual interactions between printed text, visual media, urban space, and the human body. Chapter 1 traces the rise of magazines and affordable books through the late 1920s to show how new forms of print media served as forums for the dissemination and discussion of alternative models of literary practice and social organization. In Chapter 2, I examine the journal Bungei Jidai (Literary Age, 1924-1927) to explore how a generation of authors born into the age of mass-market print established literary networks, evaluated existing paradigms of reading, and experimented with new forms of writing. In the third chapter, I examine an array of fictional texts, sociological studies, schemas of urban planning, and other representations of modern city life in order to analyze how authors and critics understood the mutual mediations between municipal space, the printed text, and the human body in this period. Finally, in Chapter 4, I identify a shift in the understanding of printed language concurrent with the changes to urban and discursive space that I discuss in the previous chapters. I follow discussions of language reform policies, literary formalism, the economics of the publishing industry, and the project of proletarian literature in the late 1920s in order to demonstrate the emergence of a sense of "literary materialism" precipitated by the proliferation of typographic text. In a brief conclusion, I address the importance of this crucial period for understanding the present shift from print to digital text.Asian literatureEast Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsOe no Masafusa and the Convergence of the "Ways": The Twilight of Early Chinese Literary Studies and the Rise of Waka Studies in the Long Twelfth Century in Japanhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:152469
Shibayama, Saekohttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14664Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:53:41 +0000This dissertation examines two major parallel but intersecting trajectories: that of kangaku (Chinese studies), specifically the Kidendô (history and literature) curriculum that flourished at the State Academy in the Heian period (794-1185), and kagaku (waka studies), which emerged in the twelfth century. I trace the concept of "way" (michi) as it evolved from the Chinese studies curriculum to an aesthetic "way of life," characterized by a spontaneous and rigorous pursuit of literature and art. The emergence of the study of waka was significant not only because it functioned as a catalyst for the preservation and renewal of the ancient practice of waka, but also because numerous commentaries on the subject formed a canon that defined Japanese cultural identity in subsequent centuries. As in the European Middle Ages, the long twelfth century (1086-1221) in Japan saw the revival of ancient customs and texts. In the West, the Greco-Roman Classics, particularly Aristotelian philosophy, were rediscovered, partly through Arabic translations. In Japan's case, the "twelfth century renaissance" of court culture was not ushered in through contact with new intellectual trends from overseas. Rather, after a century of regency rule by the non-imperial Fujiwara clan, the imperial rulers of the twelfth century were eager to legitimatize their regimes by applying the standards of newly reinterpreted precedents from the past. Called the "era of retired emperors" (insei-ki), Japanese society in the twelfth century was retrospective in character, and witnessed an effusion of cultural production, including the compilation of numerous literary anthologies, sequels to existing religious and historical texts, and treatises and commentaries on poems from the past. For courtiers, participation in imperial cultural enterprises was their sole means of assuring their families' survival, as warriors established their own government by the early 1190s. Part One examines kanshi and waka traditions before the twelfth century through textual analyses of "prefaces" (jo), the majority of which appear in the literary anthology Honchô monzui (Literary Masterpieces of Japan, ca. 1058-65). This is followed by an examination of the role of the composition of Sino-Japanese poems in the lives of scholar-officials. I show how scholar-officials professionalized this practice as part of their household studies in the ninth through eleventh centuries. As part of my investigation of the literary genre of poetry prefaces, I also analyze the Chinese and Japanese prefaces to the Kokin wakashû (Collection of Japanese Poems from Ancient Times to the Present, 905), and the poet Nôin's preface to his private collection of waka. Part Two turns to the life and works of Ôe no Masafusa (1041-1111), the foremost scholar of his time. I show how Masafusa responded to the changing realities of Kidendô scholars, while idealizing his learned ancestors, their fellow academicians, and their imperial patrons' "passions" (suki) for the composition of Sino-Japanese poems. By closely reading some of the writings attributed to Masafusa, such as the Zoku hochô ôjoden (Biographies of Those Reborn in Paradise in Japan II, ca. 1099-1104) and the Gôdanshô (Notes on Dialogues with Ôe no Masafusa, ca. 1107-11), I argue that Masafusa's nostalgic recollections of literati culture from the tenth and eleventh centuries ushered in the setsuwa (anecdotal tales) mode of narrative that epitomizes literary production in the twelfth century. Part Three investigates the evolution of waka studies in the twelfth century. I first turn to Minamoto no Toshiyori's (1055?-1129?) waka treatise, Toshiyori zuinô (Toshiyori's Principles of Waka, ca. 1111-15) and discuss the peculiarly anecdotal ways in which Toshiyori glosses ancient poetic diction for a female reader. I then examine how the Rokujô school of waka incorporated some of the formal trappings of kangaku scholarship in its revival of waka, while the Mikohidari school of waka further consolidated hereditary studies of poetry by emphasizing the difficulty of mastering waka composition. In sum, by analyzing Chinese and Japanese writings from Japan's long twelfth century, I propose a new intellectual history of Japan in a crucial period of transition from the ancient to the medieval age.Asian literature, Comparative literature, Medieval history, Medieval literatureEast Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsEnvisioning Women Writers: Female Authorship and the Cultures of Publishing and Translation in Early 20th Century Japanhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:176407
Yoshio, Hitomihttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14427Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:08:42 +0000This dissertation examines the discourses surrounding women and writing in the rapidly commercialized publishing industry and media in early 20th-century Japan. While Japan has a rich history of women's writing from the 10th century onwards, it was in the 1910s that the journalistic category of "women's literature" (joryû bungaku) emerged within the dominant literary mode of Naturalism, as the field of literature itself achieved a respectable cultural status after the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Through a close textual analysis of fictional works, literary journals, and newspapers from the turn of the century to the 1930s, I explore how various women embraced, subverted, and negotiated the gendered identity of the "woman writer" (joryû sakka) while creating their own spheres of literary production through women's literary journals. Central to this investigation are issues of media, translation, canonization, and the creation of literary histories as Japanese literature became institutionalized within the new cosmopolitan notion of world literature. The first chapter explores how the image of the woman writer formed around the key figure of Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) within the interrelated discourses of Naturalism, the New Woman, and decadence in the 1910s. As the New Woman became a social phenomenon alongside ongoing debates about women's issues, feminist women inaugurated the journal Seitô (Bluestocking, 1911-16) as a venue for women's literature. While this category renders their writings marginal to mainstream literature, it was a progressive, political position that marked their place within the literary world. I examine Toshiko's ambivalent position within this feminist project, and the instability of the media image of the New Woman that was always on the verge of slipping into the decadent figure of femme fatale. The second chapter examines the canonization of the late 19th-century prominent writer Higuchi Ichiyô (1872-96) at the turn of the century as a model woman writer and an embodiment of Japan's past tradition, which cast a threatening shadow on the women of Seitô. Tamura Toshiko's rejection of the New Woman identity and increasing association with aesthetic decadence also came to be at odds with their feminist mission. Seitô women's rejection of both Ichiyô and Toshiko was thus a necessary act in self-proclaiming the birth of the New Woman. As the number of women writers gradually increased in the late 1910s, various types of literary expression emerged beyond gendered expectations, paving the way for the mass expansion of women's writing in the 1920s. As the notion of world literature formed alongside various national literatures during the vast expansion of the publishing industry and translation culture in the 1920s, women began to envision their own alternative genealogy alongside dominant literary histories. The third chapter explores the envisioning of women's literary history by the Seitô writer Ikuta Hanayo (1888-1970) and the British modernist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whose feminist imaginations came together through the canonization of the English translation of The Tale of Genji, originally an 11th-century work written by a woman. As the growth of translations created a sense of global simultaneity, I further examine how the rhetoric of gender was central to Japanese literary modernism through the reception of two major British modernists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in Japan.Asian literature, Comparative literaturehy2163East Asian Languages and CulturesDissertationsGarland of devotees: Nābhādās' Bhaktamāl and modern Hinduismhttps://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:130087
Hare, James P.http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:9946Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:27:58 +0000This dissertation explores the Bhaktamāl and its subsequent tradition. Nābhādās' late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century collection of hagiographies praises the qualities of hundreds of devotees and thereby sets the boundaries of a devotional community that far exceeds the sectarian context in which its author wrote. By closely considering the Bhaktamāl, its commentaries, manuscripts, and print editions, this thesis traces crucial aspects of the development of modern Hinduism from the early seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Priyādās completed the first major commentary on the Bhaktamāl in 1712, approximately a century after Nābhādās composed his garland. Priyādās presents a conception of the Vaishnava community that differs significantly from Nābhādās'. After Priyādās, the Bhaktamāl tradition continued to develop through a thriving manuscript culture, and the Bhaktamāl became a popular text. During the nineteenth century, the Bhaktamāl shaped British understandings of Indian society and played a central role in traditionalist articulations of modern Hinduism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concerted efforts of "Sītārāmśaraṇ" Bhagvān Prasād "Rūpkalā" and George Abraham Grierson helped to create a sense of fixity within the Bhaktamāl tradition. Since the time of its composition, the Bhaktamāl has remained a prominent locus of dispute over the boundaries and logic of the broad-based devotional community that we now know as Hinduism.Religion, Asian literature, Asian historyjph2101ReligionDissertations